Woman Wins Marlin Tourney

The Resorter, Ocean City, MD, 1972

“A blow for the Women’s Lib movement has been struck in Ocean City.

It came from an unexpected quarter - the sport of deepsea fishing - which some people used to think was a bastion of male supremacy.

The lady who made the news was Mrs. Virginia Jenkins, an Ocean City housewife.

She made her mark by winning the big one, the Ocean City White Marlin Tournament.

There have always been lots of women taking their place in the fighting chairs on the marlin boats in Ocean City waters, but there might be a lot more next year now that Mrs. Jenkins has pointedly demonstrated that marlin fishing is not a sport reserved for men only.

In capturing her 675 points (nine marlin captured and released) to take possession of the silver trophy, Mrs. Jenkins also demonstrated that you don’t have to be a life-long devotee or a trained athlete to have some success fighting the white marlin.

She is a relative novice at the sport of deep-sea fishing. She first tried her hand with a marlin rig early in the 1971 fishing season, and didn’t have much beginner’s luck at first.

“I caught my first white marlin on August 20, 1971,” she relates. ‘, For a while, I didn’t think I’d ever catch one.”

She caught another 11 or 12 of the billfish in the remainder of the 1971 season and then came on strong this summer, capturing 23 before the marlin tournament began.

“I think I was more shocked than anybody else that I won,” Mrs. Jenkins exclaimed after the tournament was all over. “I don’t think I started out with hopes of winning.”

But she got off to a fast start and never relinquished the lead. Before the first day’s fishing was over, the resort housewife had captured seven marlin for 525 points.

She pulled in two more for a total of nine marlin for the tourney, all of them fought near the 50 fathom mark offshore.

Mrs. Jenkins said she used eels and mullet on her marlin rig, but the bait wasn’t the secret of her success.

“I won because I had the best captain and the best mate,” she said, giving the credit to Captain Roland Pieper and Bob Wimbrow, the experts who backed her up aboard the Calypso. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have caught anything.”

Mrs. Jenkins didn’t just squeak to victory in the world series of deepsea fishing, either.

Her closest competitor in the record field of 74 boats was Joseph Laing, who trailed by three marlin.

Laing, of Audubon, N.J., piled up 450 points, or six marlin, aboard the French Leave, to capture the men’s trophy - which meant only second place this year - in the tournament.

But while Mrs. Jenkins and Laing were catching and releasing more fish than anybody else, neither took the distinction of capturing the biggest marlin of the tournament.

That victory went to William Vince, of Edison, who walked off with the trophy thanks to a 69-pound billfish.

Since the tournament judges give 75 points to each fish captured and released to promote the conservation of the species, most of the contestants release their prizes. Boated marlin are awarded one point per pound, so it pays to release the little ones, and that’s the way Laing and Mrs. Jenkins played it.

Although the marlin and the anglers were ready for the big tourney, the weatherman was not. He has had it in for the Ocean City area fishermen all summer, systematically building a record of plain lousy weather. Things started out with Hurricane Agnes in June, blamed in part for the poor marlin action early in the season. The effects of the hurricane lingered for weeks, and was followed by mostly favorable weather during the middle part of the fishing season. However, heavy seas hampered the marlin boats offshore on many days that were ideal for sunbathing on the beach.

Then tropical storm Carey blew up the coast, stirring up just enough wind and rain before it petered out to ruin the first two days of the Labor Day Weekend here.

After that, anglers thought they’d had just about all the bad luck anyone deserved in one season, and were mistakenly optimistic that some long-awaited fair weather would be the rule for the marlin tournament.

It was - for the first day, when 62 billfish were captured. But the fishing was blown out on Tuesday, and the anglers had to contend with unusually heavy seas on Wednesday and Thursday as they fought the marlin. The weather committee again called off the contest on Friday because of unbeatable weather.

“It’s a big joke, with people who fish tournaments, that a little black cloud follows tournaments around,” Captain Bill Bunting, Jr. commented after the event. “Although this wasn’t totally black, it was definitely gray.”

About the only comfort anglers can take from 1972’s meteorological record is that they must have used up at least two years worth of bad weather by now, and deserve six months of fishing in 1973 without a raindrop or a whitecap to even the score.

“Ocean City has had continuously fantastic fishing year after year after year,” Bunting mused. “Everything’s been on the increase. This year it wasn’t the fish, it was the weather.”

“It might make us appreciate Mr. White Marlin even more,” he commented. “Sometimes we take these things for granted.”

The dust had barely settled on the marlin tournament before the second big event of the resort’s fall fishing season occurred.

While the marlin fishermen were resting up for the Saturday-night banquet that wraps up their tourney, Sheldon Chandler of Berlin was busy on the beach.

He pulled the first mighty drum fish of the season in from the surf that Saturday afternoon, kicking off the channel bass run that is second in importance only to the marlin tourney here in the fall.

Chandler’s fish was a 44-pound specimen, and all the early drum catches reported were in the 44 to 46-pound range. But the big drum can run anywhere from 25-60 pounds in the surf along Ocean City and Assateague.

They pass through our coastal waters each year at this time as they migrate from their northern summer grounds southward to the Carolina coast.

Their passage takes only 10 days to three weeks, but some drums should continue to make their presence known along the beaches here for the next few days before leaving for another year.”